How to purchase coins during or after the ICO

This article is for people who wish to purchase coins during or after the ICO.

Acquisition of tokens during ICO

Purchasing Bitcoin or Ethereum

The purchase of Ethereum or Bitcoin coins is carried out on the Coinbase cryptocurrency trading platform, where the user can create a personal digital wallet. The client must connect his own credit card or account and purchase the currency. It should be noted that it is desirable to acquire virtual currency, at least 7 days before the start of the ICO. This is due to the fact that the implementation of such financial transactions involving banking institutions takes several days.

Special attention should be paid to the fact that on this crypto-exchange, the amount of the commission for transaction payment is 3.99 percent, which is 2 percent more than the ordinary transaction fee.

If the currency is stored on the exchange, it is recommended that you move your own funds to the storage. It is recommended to use 2-factor authorization, but not with a binding to the phone number.

Transfer of funds to the wallet

The transfer of coins to the wallet is necessary since the user cannot participate in ICO with the account created on Coinbase. This is due to the fact that when a user uses this service, he does not have personal keys and a digital wallet address. With participation in the ICO project, the user sends his own virtual coins, and the intellectual agreement sends coins to his address. However, due to the fact that the client does not have personal private keys on Coinbase, the sending of tokens will be possible when they arrive at the Coinbase account, and not to the account of the ICO participant.

If the user prefers the Ethereum cryptocurrency, used in most ICO projects, it is recommended to use the MyEtherWallet wallet. The participant must create a personal key there, then transfer the ETH to the created digital wallet.

Another method is the use of a service called Parity, which allows you to schedule the transfer of funds for a certain time, which is convenient when you participate in the ICO.

When using Bitcoin, the best choice of wallet will be Blockchain.info.

After the completion of the process of creating a wallet and transferring coins to it, the user will receive a private address in the network, as well as a private key that allows you to get the coins you have purchased.

Sending funds to the account of the company conducting ICO

The company, which is the organizer of the ICO project, places an address for public access, where participants can send their funds. However, before sending funds, it is important to make sure that the address is real because there are many scammers in the network who want to seize the investors’ funds illegally.

So, for example, the official Coindash portal was attacked by cybercriminals during the ICO, and the address of the project was changed. Thanks to such actions, the attackers stole Ethereum coins for a total of about 7.5 million US dollars.

Also, a participant can perform the transfer using a smart contract.

For example, during the period of receipt of funds by the Gnosis forecast market, many participants feared that the collection of investors’ funds would pass very quickly and people, residing in other time zones, transferred money through the use of smart contracts.

The reason for this is that during the majority of ICO projects, investors tend to be among the first contributors, which is why they pay large sums to ensure that the financial transaction is executed as quickly as possible.

At the same time, during the Gnosis ICO-project, such rates were collected by specialized pools in advance. The latter made bets at the appropriate time, which saved a significant amount of money from some investors since a high transaction commission was evenly distributed among them. In addition, through the use of intellectual agreements, participants should not have trusted their own coins to outsiders or organizations.

Storage of received coins

To store a large amount of money, experts recommend using special offline wallets, presented in the form of compact devices that allow you to store coins without having to connect them to the Internet.

The most popular among such devices are wallets from Trezor and Ledger. To transfer coins to the device, you must connect it to the USB port, and after the transfer process is completed, disconnect the wallet from the PC. This method of storing coins is considered the safest.

If such a device is lost, the owner can restore the funds by specifying a certain sequence of words on another hardware wallet.

What to do if the wallet does not support tokens

Today, most of the coins adhere to the ERC-20 format, so the lack of support for one or another type of token is rare. However, the existence of such situations is not ruled out. In such cases, the participant must save such coins in an encrypted file on any USB storage device. Then the device should be disconnected and hidden in a safe place until the type of token is not useful to the owner.

It is also recommended to print on paper the data required to restore the private key.

The second way is to store coins on the trading platform. In such cases, you need to set the settings for 2-factor authentication.

Purchase of coins after ICO

First of all you need to buy BTC or ETH coins.

Transfer of funds to the exchange

The second step will be the transfer of funds to the cryptocurrency trading platform where the necessary tokens are available for sale. The widest choice of coins is on such exchanges as Kraken, Poloniex, and Bittrex. After determining the required exchange, the user must create his own account and get the address. Then go to the Coinbase account and enter the received address in the field of funds sending. After a while, the funds will be transferred to the selected trading platform.

Configuring the 2-factor authorization

For better safety, the user must configure 2-factor authorization. Special attention should be paid to ensure that it is not tied to the phone number. This is due to the fact that scammers repeatedly steal money from accounts with a similar way of authorization. In most cases, attackers manage to convince the operator that they are the owner of a number, after which they receive full control over SMS alerts.

At authorization, SMS-alerts come to scammers, due to which they take possession of the account, change the password and assign funds. In this regard, it is not recommended to use the phone number for authorization. In the case of using the phone as an identification tool, it is better to use the specialized Google Authenticator application, which creates special codes that last a few seconds. Alternatively, you can use an external storage device such as Yubikey.

Exchange of ETH and BTC for necessary coins

The next step is to find the required tokens. So, finding the right coin, the owner of BTC or ETH can buy it. To do this, you must select the desired number of coins and create a limit order, where you must specify the number of BTC or ETH coins that the owner intends to exchange for the desired currency.

Saving Coins

In the event that the owner of coins intends to use them for trading, you should leave the tokens on the exchange. Otherwise, it is better to save them on a removable media and hide in a safe place.